Allow me to waste your time.

Google is now alerting Gmail users about the impending retirement of its Buzz service. The notification in a yellow box reads, “Google Buzz is going away, but your posts are yours to keep” and directs users to a page that provides further information on how users can port their Google Buzz data.

And now we see that old investment Microsoft made in Facebook and its acquisition of Skype beginning to bear fruit. If Microsoft can’t compete with Google … it will Borg anyone who can. Facebook is in serious difficulty.

Skype could be a useful and interesting partner for Facebook, especially with its impending $8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Analysts have noted that in scooping up Skype, Microsoft can put the screws to Google, which reportedly had been interested in buying the company.

With a very credible and affordable Cloud streaming music service. Grab the free Pete Yorn tune and save it to the cloud. Download the Android app – yep, they have a bar code – and you’re good to go. First 5 GB is free: my favorite price point.

Oh snap! Look who just ate Apple and Google’s lunch here? Minutes ago, Amazon rolled out its very own music streaming service which is conveniently dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player. Existing Amazon customers in the US can now upload their MP3 purchases to their 5GB cloud space — upgradable to a one-year 20GB plan for free upon purchasing an MP3 album, with additional plans starting at $20 a year — and then start streaming on their computers or Android devices. Oh, and did we mention that this service is free of charge as well?

Now it’s just a question of which version of OpenStack will be implemented in Ubuntu 11.04: Austin is the codename for the current release, but Bexar is due in early February, with plans for a new release every three months.

Not yet available in a store near you. Its being shipped to pilot program participants (say that three times fast) and other developer guinea pigs. The real question: will it retail for less than an iPad?

Google’s Chrome OS, announced Tuesday, comes along with a little something that makes us gadget-freaks pretty excited: the monolithic, plain-black Cr-48, an Atom notebook that will be shipped to selected developers and others as part of Google’s Chrome Pilot Program.

You apparently get 1 teraflop for $2.10/hour. That’s almost affordable by a grad student for a thesis project. And its only $18.5K/year for continuous operations. Sound like a lot of money? No initial purchase price. No electricty needed. No floor space to rent. No charges for network connectivity. No cooling costs. No system administrator salaries. No service contracts. Nothing to recycle when you’re done.

Jealous of those research facilities with access to high-performance computing via clusters that tap the particular strengths of graphics processing units? No need–Amazon is ready to rent you that kind of muscle by the hour with the addition of a Cluster GPU Instance to its cloud-computing offerings.

This is interesting. If you have an infrequently used widget and need a host, this might fit into your budget. Its not free, but at $0.02 per hour some apps might take a long time to ring up a dollar. The other interesting point is that a Windows instance costs $0.03/hour. That’s a 50% higher cost than Linux. Can I use those numbers when I do TCO calculations for desktop replacement projects?

I can’t tell you how many of you have told me you’d like to run smaller applications at lower cost on EC2. These applications are typically low traffic/low throughput—web applications, web site hosting, various types of periodic cron jobs and the like.

I’m happy to say we have now built an instance type exactly for these purposes, called Micro instances, starting at $0.02 (two cents) per hour for Linux/Unix and $0.03 (three cents) per hour for Windows.

For example, coworkers will be able to publish their organization’s blog on Blogger, share project images with Picasa Web Albums, track industry news in Google Reader, advertise online with AdWords and much more, all without switching back and forth between multiple accounts. While these additional applications won’t initially be covered by the core suite’s support and service level agreement, this change will open up the spectrum of Google’s functionality to businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps and we’ll evaluate future support options.

So here are a couple of stories that mean more side-by-side. It looks like Apple is the new kid in town (at least as far as the Feds are concerned) and of course they have been flexing their new-kid muscles. In spite of the bad PR, Apple is still selling iPads like hotscakes with no real competitor in sight.

In addition to changes to the iPhone developer agreement banning the use of third-party development tools, a potential inquiry from federal regulators into Apple has been prompted by iAd mobile advertising network, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service.